It was only a law because it rhymes with Moore....

Who wants Handwriting Recognition anyway?

Unless you're the sort of person who uses your iPad to remote-control your Stannah Stairlift I really can't see what the market is for handwriting recognition in the modern world. Everyone's tried it in the past, but handwriting itself is a dying art.

How many of us here would genuinely find it easier to write by hand rather than type (or even stab at an on-screen keyboard). There are a few people for sure that would benefit, but it's hardly mass market.

Fruity führer?

> So If I set up a camera that has an infra-red trigger that is set off by an animal,

Then you're fine because you have set up and targeted the camera, you have framed the shot as you want it to be. It's your copyright creation.

In this particular and highly unusual case this did not happen. The photographer did not frame the shot or have any real creative input into how the shot would come out. He even claimed it was a lucky accident. As such, his involvement in creating the shot was pretty much limited to a) being in the right place at the right time and b) having the camera set up to take shots at the right exposure levels, etc - but as it was clearly set to autofocus and probably at least on either automatic exposure or automatic aperture setting (but none of us can tell that without the exif data) his argument for creative input on this is pretty week.

Similarly, if you and your family are on holiday and ask a stranger to take your photo, you still tend to own copyright of the photo because the assumption is that you are setting up the shot yourself, you are in control of where you and your family stand and the stranger is little more than a 'meat tripod'. This is where that differs from hiring a professional photographer to take your family photo.

The monkey example would be a bit analogous to you being on holiday, leave your camera on the table, someone runs up, takes your camera, takes a photo of themselves, and runs away. You wouldn't own the copyright in that case either. But then you'd probably just delete that picture (or pass it to the police!)

Not really news

As the majority of meteorites pre-date formation of planets, there are dozens of these"proto-minerals" already known.

My favourite one is the utterly bizzare icosahedrite (www.mindat.org/min-40647.html) - a natural quasicrystal - which was found in terrestrial rock, but analsys suggests the grains were derived from an ancient meteorite that were then redeposited within earth rock.

Ah yes, the inveitable bit rot that introduces new bugs into existing working software. If the app works now on an ipad, and the ipad isn't updated in any other way, it's going to continue to work, isn't it?

Microphone input NOT removed

>Muzos will also be surprised to discover that – apart from the pair of built-in microphones

>– there’s no audio input at all

Not true. All they have done (in common with other manufacturers, my 2 year old Lenovo laptop has exactly the same) is combine the two into a single extended socket much the same as is on the iPhone and other mobile devices.

So you can plug your iphone headphones/mic straight into it and use it. No need for headsets with two plugs on the end. I've found it much more useful when using skype, etc, on my Lenovo that I can plug in my iphone headphones/mic rather than carrying around a headset with two connectors.

Re: Economic harm?

"I can't believe you are stupid enough to think that there's a difference in the technology involved."

Did I mention technology at all? The technology allows me to listen to music that I have legally paid for. The fact that it allows people to listen to music they haven't paid for doesn't stop the technology working well for my purposes. Should I have to subsidise those who pirate music by paying an additional fee on my music player? No, I don't think so.

The problem is DRM can't work with audio because CDs are unencrypted 16-bit uncompressed audio. By creating a system that requires DRM, you're preventing people from using music they have already paid for (ie, format shifting), it's not just the pirates who are getting annoyed.

So, without pissing everybody off, you can't make an audio player that refuses to play pirate files. Simply isn't going to happen. If you want to blame anyone, blame the music industry for really not thinking the whole thing through in the late 70s/early 80s when they dreamt up going to digital.

"Just because an article is written by Orlowski does not mean it is completely irrational and without merit."

Re: Economic harm?

The original article, and my comment, had nothing to do with piracy, and everything to do with format shifting. Despite what record company executives may want to believe, the two are not the same thing.

If hungry musicians who sold me a CD want to eat, they can jolly well record a new album which I will buy, they should not expect me to bail them out because skanky kids are pirating their music. That's not my problem.

The Ucyclopedia list of 100 WOrst movies of all time:

contains such classics as:

"Close Encounters of the Third Reich"

Adolf Hitler returns in a UFO, and he's pissed.

"Titanic vs Godzilla"

At the end of the original Titanic, Bruce Willis (played by Leonardo Di Caprio) destroys the iceberg after drilling into it and planting a nuclear bomb in its core. But the RSS Titanic is far from safe. Blown off course, it heads into Japan, home of the notorious Godzilla

"Andy Warhol Controls the Universe"

Mr. Warhol hits new experimental heights in this film about a filmmaker making a film about a film whose filmmaker filmed it entirely with the lens cap on.

What to do with 90,000 tonnes of radioactive water?

Don't forget there are 4.5 billion tonnes of natural uranium dissolved already in the oceans. 90,000 tones of radioactive water (even if with more dangerous isotopes) is next to nothing.

This assumes of course that it can be dispersed and spread relatively evenly, rather than just dumped all in one place. But take a few slightly leaky radioactive barges on a tour around the pacific and it'll be good.

When the police came

Start panicking!

I'm more alarmed about the possibility this will trigger the earth's core to stop rotating, and that we'd have to drill down to the core and restart it spinning with nuclear weapons. I saw a documentary about this once...

Spear to Peer?

Stripping metadata

Although I wouldn't put it past Facebook to be doing this deliberately, most websites that accept image contributions are going to want to resize and possibly reduce JPEG quality of images to optimize filesize and therefore their bandwidth requirements - simple techniques for doing this (such as using the PHP GD library) don't automatically preserve the metadata from the original image

this is an appropriate title

What I really want to see

is a file copy queue. So if I drag 10 files from disk A to disk B, they start copying. But now, if I drag another 10 files, it starts a second queue of 10 files copying at the same time.

Now, there are time I may be copying 100 large files from disk A to B and then want to copy a small file from A to B at the same time, and want that concurrently, but the majority of time it would be far more sensible (and less thrashing) to append the second block of ten files to the original queue.